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RECIPE: My Grandma’s Turkey Stuffing
- Yield: Makes enough for a 20-pound bird
Description
I guess you could say this is the old-fashioned way to make stuffing — my great-grandmother also made it this way. It’s so moist, and you can change it any way you like with additions of your own, but we like it plain and simple. Makes great sandwiches with sliced turkey and cranberry sauce.
Ingredients
- 2 loaves white bread
- 1 loaf whole wheat bread
- 1/2 lb butter (2 sticks)
- 2–3 onions, chopped
- 6 stalks celery, chopped
- 1 spice jar (.65 oz) sage leaves
- 1 Tbsp salt, or to taste
- Freshly ground black pepper
Instructions
- Set the bread out to dry a couple of days before you make the stuffing.
- Put more than 6 inches of the hottest water you can stand to touch into your clean sink. Dip each slice of dried bread into the water; wring it out well, and put it into a large bowl. The bread will be kind of chunky, doughy, chewy.
- Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Turn the heat to low, and very slowly, sauté the onions and celery in the butter until soft — do not brown the butter. Meanwhile, over the sink, rub the sage leaves between your fingers and remove any woody stems, then put the leaves in the bowl with the bread.
- Pour the butter mixture over the bread and mix well with your hands (but don’t burn yourself!). Add salt — it needs a lot of salt, so they say — and then add pepper to taste. Now for the tasting, the tasting always goes on forever …is that right? More salt? More sage? More butter? So taste, and don’t worry — we’ve never measured a thing and it’s always delicious!
Notes
My Grandma’s stuffing is a very old recipe. There never was any written recipe that I ever saw. There was only one size jar of sage back then, about 0.65 oz, one regular spice jar from the supermarket. And then it’s all about tasting it. When you cook stuffing inside a turkey, the turkey will absorb some of the salt and flavoring, so my Grandma said you should add slightly more than seems right to you.
